Living Through Radical Times

Twenty-two years ago I was working in Washington, D.C., when one by one the countries of the former “Soviet bloc” asserted their freedom from the Soviet Union, a cascade of liberty that culminated in the Berlin Wall being torn down. I recall being made oddly aware of the smallness of my life—job, apartment, friends, the quest to “make it” or find oneself, to find a partner, or to “work through one’s issues,” all the contrivances of 20-30 something life—when the world was changing in ways that could not have been imagined even two years before. (I recall once asking a German friend, circa 1985, whether the wall would ever come down. “Not in my lifetime,” she said then.) Totalitarianism was believed to have a permanence to it that would outlast us all. The events of 1989 would overshadow all else in the history books.

Are we seeing another such revolutionary period with the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia? (Or are they perhaps chapters in the same revolution?) There is much that is uncertain about the situation in Egypt, and much that could go wrong. I commend (again) my favorite blog, Andrew Sullivan’s “The Daily Dish” for anyone who would like to keep up with things while also getting relatively sane commentary. http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2011/01/egypt-day-seven.html

"The Great Bridge": Civilization and the Mind of Washington Roebling

I have been reading with interest (but not without some difficulty) “The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge,” by David McCullough. “The Great Bridge” is mostly social history, which is what keeps me going and it fairly vividly portrays a time in American history following the Civil War when heroic capitalism and can-do industrial and technical know-how took off. It was a period of enormous expansion of America’s infrastructure—roads, bridges, dams, buildings and cities—and there was a sense of a continental nation, having endured its Constitutional trauma in war, now prepared to seize on its enormous potential. It was really the period when America ceased to be the agrarian nation it had been up to the Civil War, and began the process of becoming an economic colossus. It was also a period of extraordinary corruption.

I say mostly social history, because the story of the Bridge is also, invariably, an engineering story. A fair amount of text is given over to descriptions of the remarkably intricate feats of architecture, engineering and construction required in putting a suspension bridge over the East River between Brooklyn and Manhattan. If you are like me and do not easily or naturally envision mechanical and spatial images, these passages can be a bit of a trudge. For the most part though it is enough to have a general feel for the purpose that is being pursued in any given passage to get by.

On reflection I would say that the difficulty of following some of these descriptions is itself instructive. Those of us who live and function in the realm of words and ideas may please ourselves with the notion that words and ideas are what make the world go round. But the world goes around more reliably because of people who build the things that make the world accessible  and convenient. Civilizations need bridges and the people who build them, need minds that can conceive of how to sink two massive caissons (or chests, from the French) the size of football fields into opposite ends of a river to serve as foundations for stone towers, then sling steel cables from tower-to-tower and from the cables attach wires that will suspend the bridge. 

“The Great Bridge” is largely the story one such inspired mind, that of Washington Roebling. Actually, it was Washington’s father John, who originally conceived the building of the Brooklyn Bridge and was in charge of its initiation. But John was to be a casualty of work on the Bridge (he would not be the only one) and died after a freak accident early on. I have to say that this was fortuitous for the telling of McCullough’s tale, because John Roebling, though he may have been brilliant, was a somewhat weird character with a touch of the sinister about him (he appeared to have abused at least some of his children). His son Washington stepped into the breach. A veteran of several Civil War battles, including Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, Washington was a soldier’s soldier. He had a cast iron work ethic, and an attention to detail that was unflinching. Much of the first half of the book is devoted to the sinking of the caissons in the river to serve as the foundations for the two great towers facing each other ; picture two massive chests constructed of steel and timber, each the size of football fields and open at the bottom like an enormous breadbox lid. These were dropped into the river, open side down, and filled with compressed air; then workmen were lowered by means of pneumatic tubes into the caissons where they dug out the riverbed, while up above stones were piled onto the caissons to sink it into the riverbed until it rested on bedrock. Roebling himself spent much time in the caissons (at one point a fire broke out in the Brooklyn caisson and Roebling was on hand to fight it) and from these excursions suffered several bouts of the Bends (or Caissons disease, the proper name for the disorder arising from the formation of nitrogen bubbles in the bloodstream when an individual emerges too quickly from decompression). A great many workmen in the caissons of the Brooklyn Bridge fell victim to the Bends (a few of them died) and great advances in understanding the disorder, and how to prevent it, were made because of the Brooklyn Bridge experience. Roebling’s bouts with the disorder (as well as nervous exhaustion) caused him to have to take a leave, but he returned to direct the construction of the bridge from his sickbed miles away in Trenton, New Jersey.

The end result, of course, is a technical but also an aesthetic marvel, and it is worth the read to realize that the mind that  managed this feat was no less inspired than the mind that conceived the Declaration of Independence.

McCulllough quotes Lewis Mumford, in the 1920s, as saying that the Bridge proved that industrialism need not be synonymous with ugliness. "All that the age had just cause for pride in--its advances in science, its skill in handling iron, its personal heroism in the face of dangerous industrial processses, its willingness to attempt the untried and the impossible--came to  a head in Brooklyn Bridge."

Hitchens on The King's Speech

Alas, my favorite writer has some harsh words for my favorite movie (see posting below on "The King's Speech")--well, the only movie I've seen of the major Oscar contenders.

Hitchens' complaint is not with the movie--which he says is excellently made with an appealing human story--but with  the "bad history" that draws on what Hitchens calls "the cult of Winston Churchill."

Well, read for yourself.
http://www.slate.com/id/2282194/

Poem for Tuesday: Stopping By Woods......Robert Frost

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening
by Robert Frost (1927)

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though.
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

The poem that even people who don’t care for poetry probably know. (I had to memorize it in second grade.). And despite its status as something approaching the van-Gogh’s-Starry-Night of poetry, I still think of it as the quintessential winter poem. (But, then, I also like van Gogh’s Starry Night.) As your elementary or middle school teacher may have pointed out, it’s a poem of approximately 110 words in which not more than 14 are more than one syllable. From simple common words—woods, snow, deep, dark, wind, lake—Frost has painted a scene that still evokes, for readers who as a rule do not do their errands on horseback or live in “villages,” a certain iconic American pastoral. And without diminishing the simple beauty of that scene, it also shivers (if that's the right word) with intimations—of the strangeness and inscrutable nature of some of life’s passages; of the tension between the material and the spiritual, between the yearning for transcendence (and  its culmination in our final sleep) and the priority of our everyday obligations and promises.

I read that Frost said he wrote it one early morning, after a long sleepless night of working, and that it came to him almost whole, instantly, “like an hallucination.” I believe it. There is something almost clairvoyant about it.  

The Graciousness of Nature, Not Doing it Right, Bad Jokes, the Mechanism of Happiness

I took this picture early this morning, around 7 a.m. hoping to capture what felt exhilirating at the time---the biting cold air, the neighborhood still hushed, the big pine and the early morning moon against that perfect blue sky. A sense of yet another chance to do it right. Nature is gracious.  I regret slightly the streetlamp, which seems to outshine the moon. But it has its place--the mechanized, motorized, electrified world is gunning its engines. I have always liked that--coffee, the fresh start, the modern world coming back to life.

But we manage---do we not?-- never really to do it right. I contrived, despite the promising start, a day of self-doubt and resentment and self-harassment and morbid introspection.
.
Then, this evening Garrison Keillor came on the radio. It was the semi-annual "joke" show. I have always liked jokes. Corny jokes, old jokes, tired puns, slightly dirty jokes, bad jokes. I laugh at them out loud.

 Q: How do the Amish hunt deer when they can't use guns?
A. They stalk the deer down, then build a barn over it.

Q: How do you keep a blonde at home?
A: Build a circular driveway.

I laughed out loud and immediately the day was rescued. Endorphins, etc etc etc. People are basic, and happiness is mechanistic. Excercise, laugh, don't spend too much time alone.

Jim Sabin's Blog on Healthcare

Jim Sabin is a psychiatrist and an ethicist who has for several years been writing a blog I recommend. Don't let the abstruse sounding title of the blog scare you away; he writes, from the perspective of someone who has been on the "front lines" of healthcare, about matters we all care about--life, death, sickness and health and how we think about these matters and organize our society to deal with them.

Here are some posts of his.
http://healthcareorganizationalethics.blogspot.com/2011/01/states-are-hotbed-for-medical-ethics.html
http://healthcareorganizationalethics.blogspot.com/2011/01/single-payer-proposal-in-vermont.html
http://healthcareorganizationalethics.blogspot.com/2011/01/public-attitudes-towards-health-reform.html
http://healthcareorganizationalethics.blogspot.com/2011/01/public-attitudes-towards-health-reform.html

Poem for Tuesday

FROM THE AMTRAK

It is, perhaps, what you would expect to see

From an Amtrak ratcheting through the Jersey outback

Before a scrap metal yard.

But you will blink once before you are aware

It is cars you are looking at,

Pressed into the beyond,

Into the shape of things to come,

Flat as the sun and stacked like dented cards.

There’s one to the side still whole,

Waiting wheel-less, doom in its parts, for the big hammer,

Looking a bit like the Dodge you drove

The one you cursed, though it carried you there and back.

Can it be grief you feel for this machinery,

Shed like a chrome and metal mold of your heart?

But you are well on your way to another place,

In another state, when it seizes you unaware

That you are always being stripped like gears

And will be

Forever slipped free of your armor like skins,

Of all your machinations,

Loosed one by one of your devises,

Until you leave the free way,

The pistons of your own naked engine driving you home.

The Oppositionist

It was 18 years ago on a crosstown bus in Washington, D.C., that I spotted the familiar face of a gentleman sitting by himself. I ventured to tell him that I admired his work. “Very kind of you to say,” he intoned in the British baritone I had learned to expect. When he inquired what I did to make my way in the world I mumbled something barely coherent about being a “writer” and the brackish journalistic backwater where I rowed my small craft.

“Well,” said Christopher Hitchens, “there’s no finer way for a gentleman to earn a living.”

My first exposure to Hitchens was an essay he wrote in the late 1980s called “On Not Knowing the Half of It” about the late-life discovery of his Jewish ancestry, a blend of personal memoir, literary critique and political commentary. I’ve been following him ever since. The European diction of his prose and the breadth of his learning—in literature, in history, in politics—is unmatched by any of the other scribblers and scribes and pundits, including the nominally “intellectual” ones. He is fearless—not just intellectually, but actually, physically fearless. He was once quoted as saying that the reason he became a journalist was so he wouldn’t have to learn about what was going on in the world by reading about it in a newspaper, and there is not a hotspot, danger zone or armpit of the world that he has not personally visited himself when he wanted to write about it.

And he is fearless as a debater and in his choice of targets. His friend the novelist Martin Amis has spoken of “that terrible thing you do with your mouth” when he is about to deliver some pitiable adversary to the airplane propellers, there to be dispersed into fine particles all over the atmosphere. 

There are people who may wish they had never heard of Hitchens (Bill Clinton and Henry Kissinger, to name two; the latter was so thoroughly skewered, in “The Trial of Henry Kissinger,”  as a mass murderer and war criminal that the book must surely be accounted among the most defamatory pieces of writing in the history of muckraking journalism.)  And Hitchens has collected some other enemies along the way—some who thought he betrayed a friend, Sidney Blumenthal, in his zeal to prosecute Bill Clinton as a misogynist rapist; others who will never forgive him for his support of the war in Iraq; still others who think he defames religion and faith (Hitchens would respond that he certainly hopes he does so).  

There was a time when some of these enemies resorted to Hitchens' famed capacity for drink as an explanation for his behavior or his views they didn’t like.  Speaking personally (as one who has had to put the cork in the bottle long before drinking anywhere near as much as Hitchens has spilled)  this has always seemed to be not just a low blow, but a weak one. I would do a lot to be able to drink half as much as he is reported (by himself and others) to have put away, write one-tenth as well, and be one-one-thousandth as prolific.

But now Hitchens’ penchant for booze and cigarettes has caught up to him, and I think his enemies can only be feeling renewed esteem for him. In the teeth of stage-four esophageal cancer, he continues to be productive and literate, as in this on-the-money piece about Glenn Beck and the Tea Party (and written, by the way, several weeks prior to the shooting in Arizona). http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/01/hitchens-201101

And he continues to be unrepentant in his repudiation of all things theological. Hitchens has a lot of passions¸ but it seems that his atheism—actually, what he calls his anti-theism (he doesn’t just not believe in God, he thinks the notion of God is a positively bad one)—is the one that animates all the others.

As it happens, I am one who clings to the belief that whatever it is within us that causes us to yearn for the divine is a reflection of the divine (as opposed to a remnant of humanity’s childhood, as Hitchens would have it, or an artifact of our neurochemistry). But I think that Hitchens’ voice has been a positively good one for faith by forcing it, so to speak, to clear its voice and say what it means, and what it doesn’t mean, and to confront its contradictions and stupidities.

Or at least by forcing people of faith to reveal themselves. For instance, (and leaving quite aside the lowlifes online and elsewhere who wish him a slow, painful death) I have noticed even in his most respectful and earnestly well-wishing interviews that there is an undertone of unseemly curiosity about the state of his soul. Surely now that are you are face-to-face with death, Mr. Hitchens, you are willing to acknowledge a God?  No? Not even just a little?

I wonder how many people who secretly wonder that, or would like to see the question put to him, are aware that they are in fact, proving Hitchens right: that their faith, or what they call their faith, is really about fear. Fear of the dark, fear of the unknown, fear of dying.

Hitchens mocks the “celestial dictatorship” that he says people of faith are yearning for. To the extent that the religious are seeking just that—an overseer of absolutes, absolving us of uncertainty and ambiguity—Hitchens is right both that it is folly (there  is, demonstrably, no such overseer and no solving the ambiguity and uncertainty of human life) and that it is a dangerous folly now that religion has become politicized and weaponized. A faith in absolutes tends to be absolutely uncompromising.

“If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving,” James Baldwin wrote fifty years ago (in “The Fire Next Time”).  “If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.” I think the question isn’t settled. But Hitchens is right that the indoctrinated believers in celestial dictatorship are everywhere, seeking to force their vision of The Truth on the rest of us. And if a fiery end should come, it will almost certainly not be abortion or gay marriage or the teaching of evolution or any of the other bug-a-boos of those who think "secular humanism" is a dirty phrase, but religion—keen and fervent and righteous—that will ring down the curtain on us all.

"A Different Sort of Success Story"

“A core finding of this work is that we are not primarily the products of our conscious thinking. The conscious mind gives us one way of making sense of our environment. But the unconscious mind gives us other, more supple ways. The cognitive revolution of the past thirty years provides a different perspective on our lives, one that emphasizes the relative importance of emotion over pure reason, social connections over individual choice, moral intuition over abstract logic, perceptiveness over I.Q. It allows us to tell a different sort of success story, an inner story to go along with the conventional surface one. “

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/17/110117fa_fact_brooks

Neuroscience is the future. But  people commonly assume it’s going to tell us something reductionist about ourselves, that we are all about synapses and neurotransmitters and neural chemistry. I think we will be surprised.  A neurologist once told me, “We have not begun to fathom how complicated the brain is. Several orders of complexity greater than we now assume.”

Jared Loughner, Sarah Palin, DSM and Interesting Contradictions

At the party, Frances and Carpenter began to talk about “psychosis risk syndrome,” a diagnosis that Carpenter’s group was considering for the new edition. It would apply mostly to adolescents who occasionally have jumbled thoughts, hear voices, or experience delusions. Since these kids never fully lose contact with reality, they don’t qualify for any of the existing psychotic disorders. But “throughout medicine, there’s a presumption that early identification and intervention is better than late,” Carpenter says, citing the monitoring of cholesterol as an example. If adolescents on the brink of psychosis can be treated before a full-blown psychosis develops, he adds, “it could make a huge difference in their life story.”
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/12/ff_dsmv/3/

There is a great debate to be had about this, once everyone stops debating whether Sarah Palin incited Jared Loughner to his massacre in Arizona.

(Ok, very quickly….I think some people on the left, as well as my favorite conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan—who, to put it very mildly, is not a fan of Sarah’s—jumped on this a little too fast and a little too hard. Which doesn’t excuse Palin, whose rise to prominence is a symptom of severe dysfunction in American politics; I can’t help thinking that some of the “respectable” conservative types, like George Will, who defend Palin, do so only because they take great delight in how utterly crazy she drives the opposition. Well, that kind of delight is bad for the soul, and conservatives and the Republican Party may come to rue the day they ever heard of Sarah Palin. Too bad for them; they created, tolerated--and almost allowed within a heartbeat of the Presidency--this public fraud; let them choke on their creation.)

But back to business….One of the really serious debates that is being raised about the new DSM manual being produced has to do with the possible inclusion of a syndrome for designating people—invariably adolescents---who are at risk for psychosis, but who may not yet be psychotic. Critics like Allen Frances have  a legitimate point: there is real potential for drug companies to seize on a new market for kids who might in another day have been considered “eccentric” or “creative.”

But there is also real science behind the early identification of individuals at risk for psychosis.   “The risk syndrome criteria we are proposing for DSM-V have already proven capable of identifying a clinical entity within a help-seeking population in which 1 out of 3 individuals develops a bona fide DSM-IV psychotic disorder within two and a half years,” says psychiatrist Thomas McGlashan. “This amounts to a true positive rate of 33 percent.” McGlashan said that compares favorably with the predictive power of hypertension for stroke or of hyperlipidemia for a coronary event.  (http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/content/44/16/5.1.full).

Psychosis is not a bad case of depression or anxiety. And it’s not a matter of being “eccentric” or “creative.” People with schizophrenia are often incapable of working, typically have few friends, create enormous havoc and heartbreak within their families, are a costly burden to the healthcare system and society at large, and die earlier than the general population. Untreated, they can be violent; sometimes they go off to the shopping center and shoot up congresspersons and nine-year-old girls.

Jared Loughner didn’t go to bed one night perfectly normal and wake up the next morning with paranoid schizophrenia. Just as a heart attack is the end stage result of a long train of cardiovascular complications over what may be a period of years, so a “psychotic break” is the end stage result of a long, possibly slow descent into ilness. Some people with schizophrenia report having first heard voices as early as junior high school; they may have lived with these voices for many years before their illness came to anyone’s attention. The possibility of identifying, diagnosing and treating people before they become psychotic is a prospect with enormous public health potential. There is also the potential for mischief. And the debate about this will make for some interesting politics: some of the conservative voices today who are saying that Sarah Palin (or the general poisonousness of the political climate) should not be blamed for the Arizona massacre because Jared Loughner was a delusional madman who lived in his own twisted world, have in the past also been quick to jump on the theme about "drugging our children” and the overuse of medication.

It’s always interesting when people’s contradictions become too obvious for them to ignore.      

Care of the Soul

“You don't have to talk too long to patients and their families, as well as doctors and nurses, before they express a common feeling that contemporary medicine, for all its technological virtuosity, lacks something,” he said. “Patients and families will talk about how the medical establishment is just so huge and they feel like a piece of machinery. When I tell them about how images and architecture can transform a healing environment—about how the way a hospital room looks and feels can be a part of healing—they are a little surprised, but they know what I am saying. So I seem to be giving people a language for talking about things they know intuitively."

http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/content/45/23/14.full
I’ve never read Moore’s bestseller, “Care of the Soul.” It’s a book that appeared in the 1990s at a kind of apex of technological efficiency, a time when there seemed to be no ceiling on the stock market (remember that?), when it seemed we had mastered even the dynamics of conflict (remember the end of history?). The trend, it seemed, was relentlessly up, but Moore’s book came along just then to say that there was a great poverty of soul at the heart of this technologically triumphant age. Magic, mystery, a sense of the sacred, and the sacraments and rituals that honor these seemed to have been banished from our culture. The book struck a chord. It seems relevant to recall that some commentators, marveling at the worldwide extravaganza of excess that was Princess Diana’s funeral, saw it as a great cultural portent, a yearning on the part of millions, however vicarious, for participation in the magic and poetry that Diana’s life seemed to embody, and to mourn for its demise (so the story went) at the hands of a soulless, tabloid culture.

My exposure to Thomas Moore came more recently, with his book, “Dark Nights of the Soul.” He carries the same message—that the soul, however you define it (or however you deny it) yearns to be nurtured. And our darkest nights can be, he says, when our souls are born or reborn.

 I’ve become a believer. Faith is a problem to me (though I can’t seem to shake it) and I am not certain of many of the articles of the religious faith. But the soul, my soul, is something I can believe in, if only because I can feel it. I know my own soul, and can marvel at how it seems to have fed on my darkest nights. I am more of a person—more of who I am—as a result of these dark nights. And I am more aware than I have ever been of how much I need the things the soul requires—ritual sacraments (even the secular kind, like a trip to the coffee house every morning before walking my dog in the park), sacred places (the lake, the park, the sanctuary of the church I attend), and silence.

The King's Speech

“We’re not a family, we’re a firm,” says the Duke of York, fated to be a reluctant monarch and played by Colin Firth, in “The King’s Speech.” And his father, King George V, grumbles about how this newfangled thing, the radio, has reduced the royal family to performers “invading” the homes of their subjects. (Lucky for King George he hasn't been around to see the present day Windsors, with their tabloid marriages, divorces, assignations and embarrassing photographs). Later, when the Duke has ascended to the throne following the abdication of his brother Edward—a playboy and a closet Fascist played with a touch of malevolence by Guy Pearce—the new monarch wonders what kind of King he is: he can’t raise an army, declare a war, levy a tax.

It’s a beautiful film and a crowd pleaser—stirring and sad and funny. And Americans like movies about the Brits. This one is also, I think, subtly subversive of the idea of royalty . What you feel most poignantly in Firth’s portrayal is the cruelty of the pretense of monarchy---a pretense that depends on  a certain elevated distance to maintain the myth of divinity, and a population willling to believe the myth--in an age when the all-too human foibles of a monarch are on view, or audible, for all to see and hear. Brutalized as a child but cossetted in privilege and never knowing an hour of productive labor, the reluctant King knows what his family is, but must appear before his people as the heir to a divine line. That he shoulders the burden his vain but intellectually inferior brother shirks and goes on to inspire his people in wartime is his greatness. It’s a genuinely moving story, but this viewer could not also help feeling what a cruel and wasteful anachronism is the British royalty. The three principals—Firth; Geoffrey Rush as Lionel Logue, the King’s speech therapist; and Helena Bonham Carter as his wife, Queen Elizabeth—are all brilliant. My favorite is Helena Bonham Carter, tirelessly slumming it to find her husband the help he needs, but insisting everywhere on protocol.

The Regular Thing

Walking with my dog, Kristina, in the Cleveland Metroparks every morning is the most regular thing I do. I have seen the park now for several years in its transitions from spring to summer to fall and winter. The more  you pay attention, the more you see so that you can sometimes sense the world tilting by degrees well before there are obvious seasonal changes in foliage. In the spring the forest floor is carpeted with green sprouts.Fall, of course, is the best here in northeast Ohio.

After ten years in the Cleveland area, I have learned to love the winter (well, a little bit, sometimes). I love the look of the park when there is snow and the river ices over. I like especially the way the snow seems to paint itself on the trees. And the view from the park beneath the Hilliard Street Bridge is always scenic, in any season.

I find myself wishing often I knew how to paint. No chance there. But it's this--the desire to learn how to  do something expressive beyond the range of words and ideas--that accounts for the piano lessons.

Give Parents an Extra Vote for Every Child

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0111/46977.html

Michael Kinsley never fails to say somethng fresh, original and on target. He has articulated in books and many artiicles something I have long believed--that the long-term problems America faces are largely the creation not of "the politicians" or "the liberals" (or the "conservatives" or the Republicans) but of the American public, which demands things of its government that it doesnt want to pay for (then makes an elaborate show--a la the Tea Party--of disliking government spending!!)

Here he poses what may be a slightly toungue-in-cheek solution to a real problem---the massive transfer of wealth and power across generations to the elderly.

My Blogging Ideal

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/

My favorite blog, the only one in fact that I read every day. Sullivan has much of what I admire in a writer and a thinker--especially, the ability to question one's own ideologies. A conservative and staunch admirer of Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, he is mostly disgusted by the Republican Party of today---not just for its patent betrayal of conservative values during the eight years GWB's presidency, but for the intellectual dishonesty, opportunism and spin-mongering of some of its prominent spokespersons (Karl Rove, William Kristol).
And he defies the standard categories--he is an outspoken gay activist, and a deeply devout Catholic.
His blog covers a lot of ground and is not exclusively about politics. This entry here http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2011/01/a-journey.html on the spirituality of dropping acid is reflective of his intellectual curiousity.

A Single Man''s Faith

The new Harry Potter was great, and Im not a Potter fanatic. Looking forward to seeing The King's Speech. And Tron got a good review from a reliable source. Here's what I thought about the best movie I saw last year, in a review I wrote in a venue that was read by exactly nobody.

“A Single Man,” might be regarded as any number of things—art flick, period piece, a love story set in an era when gay people were either persecuted or invisible. But it is not a stretch to suggest that the film is also a story about faith—although not perhaps as it is typically portrayed in religious circles.  

Set in Los Angeles against the backdrop of the Cuban Missle Crisis, “A Single Man” portrays a day in the life of  52-year-old English professor George Falconer (played by Colin Firth, nominated for Best Actor in the Academy Awards) in the aftermath of the sudden death of his partner of 16 years.

It is a day that George is planning to end with a suicide. Darkness—the imminence and finality of death, the threat of nuclear showdown, the frustration of dreams, and the unalterable alone-ness of the human condition—are everywhere. Moreover, all the traditional moorings are disintegrating. George,    a British ex-patriot who came to the States in the fifties because it was the place to be, laments what he calls the “total breakdown of culture and manners.” Traditional religious faith and the name of God are not, in this story, anywhere to be found.

And yet George is redeemed by the intervention of an infatuated student, Kenny, himself groping in the darkness, but possessed of a guileless kindness and a simple faith in doing the next right thing—  

with George passed out after a day of heavy drinking, Kenny hides the suicide gun with him as he slumbers, angelically, in a neighboring room.

Death is not to be avoided—in this life or in this movie—but George rediscovers his faith. “The times I have felt most alive are those times I have made a connection,” he says—with a friend, a lover, with the natural world.

The pious often portray faith as a matter of believing things that are unbelievable, of leaving oneself intellectually defenseless for the sake of a dogma. Is it any wonder that atheists—from Christopher Hitchens to Richard Dawkins to Sam Harris—are writing bestsellers?

Might not faith be better understood as fidelity, an intentional “staying with”--staying with the difficult marriage, the hopeless or perilous situation, the friend or stranger in need? Think of Christ in Gethsemane lamenting that none of his friends would stay away with him—or of Kenny who did stay.

And it might also be understood as a fidelity, an openness, to those moments of connection when life, seemingly flat and one dimensional, reveals itself in depth and nuance and wonder—an  “assurance of things hoped for,” as Paul says, “of things yet unseen.” 

It's a dark film, but not a sad one.  

“In our culture, we all live in the future,” Tom Ford, director of “A Single Man” said in an interview. As soon as we get that new house, that new job, that new girlfriend or boyfriend or those new shoes, everything is going to be fine. But it isn't. Because it's a kind of thing that can never be fulfilled. It's very hard to do, but I try to remind myself every day to be really present and enjoy life.”

Do I Get Milk and Cookies After I Practice?

I have begun taking piano lessons from my daughter's teacher. This ought to be interesting. Yes, it is slightly weird sitting down with another adult and playing "Camptown Races" or "Yankee Doodle." But I am already enjoying it.

My Daughter’s Piano Lesson

Her back is turned to me

A small Asian beauty in black.

Straddling the bench at the ominous grand. 

A concentrate of my daughter’s face

Behind her in a shiver of light.

Alone, it is just the two of them now,

And they work.

Well, it is I that brought her here,

I say to myself,

Sinking in the sofa in a darkening room,

Apart, and pay the monstrous fee.

I have been undone by small chores

I think, as if dishes were not done too

By elites of discipline I never could muster

And now on the outside looking in, never will.  

They work.

Not just piano but pianissimo

Through the hour made long

By the early winter dark

And the repetitions of “softer, softer….”

She is learning, my daughter, from the heir

Of an ancient dynasty, the world is nuanced,

Infinite in believable interpretations

If only you are trained to summon them,

And having summoned, can believe in them,

And by belief give reason to believe.

But that, I suppose, is for the advanced.

We once saw the teacher in a recital hall

Seduce the Brandenburg from a harpsichord

So that we thought it might get up—

I mean the music itself!—climb into the seats

And shake hands with us.

                                           

 They work until the hour winds down

 And the teacher releases her back to me

We look alike, it’s said, and I do bear

The ghost in my face of the child

My daughter will soon cease to be.

Cease, for I know now in that hour

One of the ways of becoming

Someone other than who she might

Have to be, has been slipped

Into her fingers like a code.

And already as we head to the door

She has become less mine, more her own,

Than she was before.

Psalm by Reed Whittemore

The Lord feeds some of His prisoners better than others.

It could be said of Him that He is not a just god but an

indifferent god.

That He is not to be trusted to reward the righteous and

punish the unscrupulous.

That He maketh the poor poorer but is otherwise undependable.

It could be said of Him that it is His school of the germane

  That produced the Congressional Record.

That it is His vision of justice that gave us cost accounting.

It could be said of Him that though we walk with Him all

The days of our lives we will never fathom Him

Because He is empty.

These are the dark images of our Lord

That make it seem needful for us to pray not unto Him

But ourselves.

But when we do that we find that indeed we are truly lost

And we rush back into the safer fold, impressed by His care

For  us.

--Reed Whittemore

On a dark winter night of my 50^th year, I want to be in the safer fold. Who doesn't?

But I am aware it may be only a wish. And it seems vital to live with one's eyes open (even, or especially, in the dark!) and without illusions. The randomness, the indifference of nature has gripped me lately and I have wandered in a field of my own indifference and, then, of willful unbelief. One does get lost.

But a faith in certainties, in absolutes, no longer seems plausible to me and I have spent some time meditating on the—it seems to me—unavoidably manipulative nature of belief. We believe because we want to be safe in the dark. We want our children to be secure and healthy, our employers to treat us fairly, our spouses and significant others to act like they like us from time to time. We want the show to come off, and things to go well. It seems hard to deny that the prayers of even the most spiritually advanced are tinged with a little bribery. Or so I cannot help cynically asserting.

What does a faith look like that is not about bribery, that does not rely upon pat and wishful answers to life's uncertainty, but throws itself unreservedly on the  mercy of an unknowable providence? That will be a question to meditate on here.

Nature is indifferent and life is random. Yet I want to believe that God is with us in the darkness. And it may be that this is the essential Christian message--Emanuelle, God With Us. "Fear not, for lo, I tell you, I am with you always." Perhaps He is. But not as a magician relieving us of suffering and uncertainty. Rather, as a companion, suffering with us in the randomness  and indifference of creation. That is the  faith I can muster. But I need that much, at least.

So shut up and write!

A number of years ago I opened a blog, under a title similar to this one, and entered one brief paragraph and a question for readers about a movie popular at the time. As soon as I wrote it, I knew there was no reason in the world why anyone would ever navigate their way to that lonely page in cyberspace, or would care about the innocuous little contribution to the aural traffic jam of opinion and argument and noisemaking that is modern discourse. The futility of the enterprise seemed demeaning and a little pathetic, so I dropped it.   

It is still out there, like a tiny blinking star in cyberspace. If there is a way to remove it or obliterate it, I do not know the way. And so I can imagine it living on¸ to be found years later,  like some archeological artifact—a shard or object of household debris—indicative of thwarted intentions in the age of the Internet, or of the loneliness and desiccation of society (why wasn’t this writer out bowling with his family or friends?).  Or of something. Or nothing.

But here I am giving it another try.  My motives are different, or so I am pretending. Of course I want to be read, but I expect not to be and don’t care. That, anyway, is the pretense. To write about what I care about, and to do it as well as I can as if it were being read (because after all, it might—just might—actually attract a reader somewhere), but at the same time as if the opinion of others did not matter (because after all it is very likely never to be read by anyone, ever)—this is a premise upon which a blog can be written. And if it moves me to actually write every day, it can be sustained and will be its own reward regardless of whether I have readers. Writers are people who write. So write goddamn it.